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Sounds like terrific news for ARM device owners. It might take a few months, but it looks like they'll eventually be able to download a generic ARM targeted image off their favourite distro and it should just work.

The Raspberry Pi owners should be especially happy. While this benefits the whole ARM community, there was early doubts about the A5s and Broadcoms since they're somewhat dated and it seemed the push was in making sure the current and up and coming SoC would work.

Though I'm not too familiar with the CSR SiRFatlas6. I think that's somewhat like the SiRF gps chip I have in my ancient Mio C220 (currently has WinCE on it) but I'm not sure. It would be pretty cool to see that weird little thing running linux :P Now if I could only remember where I put it...

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Their focus should really be to make 100% sure there is unified support for the ARMv8 architecture from day one of ARMv8 chips coming to market.

Just forget about ARMv7 and ARMv6. With the exception of Cortex 15 and S800, most of the other chips are too slow for Linux anyway, and they won't be used much in the future, so why bother getting unified support for ARMv7? Just get the support you need for specific chips that are very popular, like the Raspberry Pi (ARMv6), and Tegra 3 I guess, since it's in Nexus 7, and I've seen it's used by quite a few with Linux on it.

But getting support for ARMv8 from day one, and making sure any Linux distro runs flawlessly on any ARMv8 machine is so MUCH more important, since that's the future for ARM, and most of the ARM notebooks (ChromeOS/Android) and ARM servers are going to be using that soon, and then you can put Linux on them. The support for the rest should only be done as a hobby, and as something "nice to have".

Flawless support for ALL ARMv8 in 2014 is a MUST. Time is running out and I'd rather they don't waste time on chips that are too slow anyway, and will be made irrelevant very soon.

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ARM should have provided unified stuff for this from day 1 so vendors wouldn't have this problem. Who thinks having a standardized instruction set is enough if how to load software on it isn't unified. It kinda destroys the advantage of using an industry-standard instruction set and destroys part of the savings that can be had from having unified software that just works anywhere.

That's quite unfortunate to come this far and stop a driver or two before functional mainstream support. But who knows, maybe just the existence of the infrastructure will motivate the maintainers to update and push upstream. There are developers hacking away at the videocore just because of the pi so surly there should be capable individuals that might take matters into their own hands and get this working. It's not like this hasn't happened before...